If Abe, John-Bot, Drew Tetz, and Seth Peterson aren't some of your favorite yoyo players ever, you might be doing it wrong. Take a look back at 2010 with this classic video from the most illustrious and mysterious team (yes, more mysterious than Team Mysterious Raccoon, even) in the history of Midwestern yoyoing. Yoyos used are all out of production, sorry.

If Abe, John-Bot, Drew Tetz, and Seth Peterson aren’t some of your favorite yoyo players ever, you might be doing it wrong. Take a look back at 2010 with this classic video from the most illustrious and mysterious team (yes, more mysterious than Team Mysterious Raccoon, even) in the history of Midwestern yoyoing.

Oh, the late 90s/early 2000s were an amazing time for yoyoing worldwide. Unfortunately, there is video evidence of a lot of it. Check out this commercial for the UK-based “PowerYO” line of products. Like most product lines that rolled in during the boom, this one didn’t last very long but at least we got this gem of a TV commercial.

Thanks to Luke Roberts (featured in the commercial!) for getting this glorious bit of awfulness online for us.

This was from way back in 2004, when a company in the UK (Peterkin) decided to start up their own yo-yo brand, and myself, Arron Sparks, Paul Sargent and Sean Misselbrook were part of the PowerYo demonstration team.

We toured across the UK – even doing a stint in Butlins! It was great fun and you can still even buy some PowerYo products to this day! (Some will be going up on the store this weekend).

There was a hell of a yoyo craze happening in 1998, and I wanted in on it. I’d gotten to be a pretty decent player at that point, for the time anyway, and was building up a solid catalog of original tricks…something that wasn’t happening much yet, so it set me apart. I called Alan Nagao, the guy who was in charge of HPK Marketing and heading up a massive team of yoyo demonstrators called “Team High Performance” to see about a job.

Alan: “Can you do Two-Handed Shoot The Moon?”

Me: “No, I mainly focus on original single-handed tricks.”

Alan: “Oh, well, sorry I can’t really use you then.”

Not sure if I missed out or dodged a bullet with that one, but either way it left me at loose ends. And then my boss at the time got a sample of a new yoyo from an RC car company called Team Losi, and I thought “Well hell, I’ll call them and see what’s what.” It was a good phone call, they seemed like good folks, and they offered to fly me out to the 1998 World YoYo Contest in Primm, Nevada and meet me there to talk about a sponsorship. I got drunk during the contest and fell asleep at my table waiting to go on stage. Jon Gates kicked me and woke me up, and I jumped up, filled my pockets with the yoyos that were on the table, and ran up to the stage. I ended up competing mainly with a Spintastics Tigershark and a Team Losi Da Bomb, both with wood axles, and taking 4th Place. (Ben McPhee took 5th Place, and both of our trophies starting falling apart on stage. He ended the awards ceremony with a pile of trophy parts in a heap, gathered in his t-shirt.) The Team Losi guys were impressed, and offered me a gig as a demonstrator and consultant on retainer.

They already had the Da Bomb, their standard shaped yoyo, completed. They wanted a butterfly shape, and showed me a render. I made some suggestions, drew some ideas, and after some back-and-forth and a trip for me out to visit their office in Chino, California, the Cherry Bomb was designed. The first version, the red one, was made of ABS and came with weights that you could add to change the way it played. The idea behind Team Losi yoyos was to treat yoyos the same way they produced RC cars…you bought a model, and then you bought parts to customize it to suit your style. Yoyo players weren’t super into the idea, though, so instead I had them experiment with chrome plating and other materials and the results were the A-Line (made of a sort of glittery, denser plastic) and the Silver Series, which were chrome plated. Counterweight yoyoing was created on those yoyos, and I used a prototype Silver Series Cherry Bomb to win the 1999 Bay Area Classic, the first time anyone saw counterweight yoyoing.

Team Losi didn’t last long in the yoyo market, and we parted ways a year later when Duncan offered me more money, benefits, and the chance to freeze my @$$ off in Ohio. The owner of Team Losi, Gil Losi Sr, sold the company in 2001 and the yoyo line ended pretty much right there. It was a brief moment in the history of the industry, but it was my first gig with a manufacturer and I’ll always look back fondly on it.

I’m pretty excited to see that YoYoExpert has scored some old dead stock of the original Team Losi yoyos. I don’t even personally have any left, so I’ll be buying a few of these myself. They definitely don’t play up to today’s standards, but they are a fun throw and an interesting look back at a weird moment in the early history of modern yoyoing.

Here’s a glorious bit of yoyo history…a Russell yoyo commercial from one of their Coca-Cola campaigns in the Philippines in 1988!

Russell Promotions started as the international arm of Duncan Toys back in the 1940s, and eventually split off entirely. Russell partnered for decades with Coca-Cola, offering them some of the most effective and pervasive promotions ever run, and cementing Coca-Cola’s market share across the globe by using yoyos as a “fad toy” that required money + bottle caps to buy. Brilliant, right? With this tactic Russell sold more yoyos than any other company in the history of the industry. Not bad!

Apparently, giant yoyos aren’t just for people trying to get into the record books. Back in 1986, a couple of inventive pranksters built a giant yoyo and hung it from the Portlandia statue in Portland, Oregon. Marked only with “Portland YoYo Co.”, the yoyo was about 24 inches in diameter and weighed about 40 pounds. And it was a lovely shade of orange.

Thanks to Ben McPhee for tipping us off to this article at OregonLive.com!

Huge thanks to Gabriel Lozano for making this awesome time capsule of a video available! Here we have the legendary SpinDox YoYo Club, performing during the seventh inning stretch of an Oakland A’s baseball game on July 29th, 2000. This yoyo club is single-handedly responsible for some of the biggest innovations in modern 1A yoyo play! From suicides to magic drops, most of what we consider modern 1A is based off concepts from these players. And seriously…check out Paul Escolar’s hair. Damn, dude!

For the new generation of players, this sort of thing looks hopelessly dated and ridiculous but it’s worth noting that for a really long time, this VHS video was one of the only pieces of yoyo instruction available anywhere in the world.

The Smothers Brothers are a comedy duo that began performing together in the late 1950s. Brothers Tom and Dick Smothers built a generally clean but often subversive comedy act that slipped in a lot of left-leaning political views, social commentary, and other sub-culture references that audiences at the time either loved or hated. They were cutting edge for many years, and when they landed “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” on CBS. According to Wikipedia “it started out as only a slightly ‘hip’ version of the typical comedy-variety show of its era, but rapidly evolved into a show that extended the boundaries of what was considered permissible in television satire.” The show featured many writers and series regulars who went on to successful comedy careers, including Steve Martin. The show also presented the top musical acts of the day, many of whom were shunned elsewhere on TV due to the nature of their music, including The Doors, Joan Baez, Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, Pete Seeger and a stunning performance by The Who which climaxed with the literal explosion of their drums.

“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” became as controversial and influential as it was popular, satirizing politics, racism and the unpopular Vietnam War among other topics. Despite the show’s success, in April of 1969, the Smothers Brothers were fired by the CBS Television Network. “Smothered – The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” a film by director, Maureen Muldaur, documents the Brother’s struggle against censorship and, as a lawsuit later determined, the wrongful firing by CBS.

Comedy and variety pioneers, excellent performers, and an entertaining yoyo player…the Smothers Brothers give us an excellent glimpse into the very early days of yoyoing, and a rare look at reclusive yoyo demonstrator Dan Volk who appears here as “The YoYo Master”. (Editors Note: He’s reclusive enough that he lives in Cleveland, probably about 20 minutes from me, we have friends in common, and I’ve never met the dude.)

Chuck Short found this great old bit of newsreel footage on YouTube, featuring a Filipino Regiment in the US Army. The entire reel is just a little under 5 minutes and worth watching the whole thing…but if you just want to see a couple of young Filipino soldiers slinging yoyos you can skip ahead to 2:33 in the video.

As usual, we get the whole “yoyo was invented by Filipinos” myth which is false, but still…it’s a pretty awesome bit of historical footage! Here is some more detail about this bit of film:

U.S. Army Filipino Infantry regiments training at Fort Ord, Camp Roberts, and Camp Hunter-Liggett, California during World War II. The video shows the training and routine of the soldiers, mostly comprised of Filipino American volunteers and veterans during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines and are preparing for the retaking of their homeland during Gen. MacArthur’s return.

We can’t do 5A May without a 5A Throwback Thursday! Instead of going back all the way to the birth of 5A, let’s take a look at one of the unsung (or rather “less-sung”) heroes of 5A, Duncan Crew Singapore’s Andrew Lin.

His Pure Freehand video series, released over a couple of years, were some of the first clips to feature 5A exclusively, and were most influential in the early 2000s counterweight play.

The first video explored some new concepts in 5A. While aerials and e-fans were commonplace back then, Andrew introduced new mounts and transitions, and opened the path for complex combos in 5A. His shirts were also unreasonably big.

The second video, a true 5A classic, is where the see where the first video’s path led to. While not terribly difficult by today’s contest standards, all the counterweight releases and mount transitions in the video were previously unheard of, and it’s easy to see how those concepts influenced some of today’s greatest combo builders, such as JonRob and Ryota Torigoe.

Finally, the last video of the series explores sliding dice, triangles, and adds a healthy dose of complexity to 5A. The last trick in the video is pure genius, a brilliant finishing touch to the series.

Andrew was not limited to releasing videos, of course, and his 3rd place finish at the 2005 World Yo-yo Contest was a well-deserved highlight in his 5A innovator career.

Put down the metal and grab that good old plastic Freehand today. It doesn’t get any purer than this!

Here’s an awesome submission we got from the 1960 Hong Kong yoyo champion, Tony Tebbutt. It’s always great to get first-hand accounts of yoyo contests from the “golden age”. Check out what Tony has to say about the contest below. (Thanks to Korda at YoYoStore.cz for sending us this one!)

That’s me in the center of the photograph, the 1960 yo-yo champion of Hong Kong and Macau. I won what was then an enormous prize of $7,500 HKD (editor’s note: that’s about $15,790 USD today!) sponsored by Coca Cola and Russell yo-yo’s. I think this was the first such contest in Asia and the skill level and engineering development of the yo-yo today is light years ahead of what we had in the 1960’s. Nevertheless the competition was as fierce as it is today and the experience was one of the highlights of my life. My ability with the yo-yo never left me and throughout my career I would find occasions to use my yo-yo to bring some fun and levity to speeches to some very large audiences. This Hong Kong boy, born of Eurasian heritage, went on to University in California and senior management positions in Canada and England before becoming the President of a $2 billion US company. Keep practicing, you never know where your yo-yo might take you! Today I am 66, retired, wrote a book on my teenage years in Hong Kong (including the yo-yo contest) and on occasion I still give yo-yo demonstrations.

As a former yo-yo prodigy, it is so exciting to read about the re-emergence of yo-yo contests around the world and then be able to watch some of the performances via YouTube. Technology and Talent have brought the modern-day yo-yo contest to a vastly different skill level vs. the way it was in Hong Kong in the year 1960. In those days, the contest format was very different but the pressure to perform was as grueling as it is for today’s contestants. If you would like to know more about a major yo-yo championship held back in the “old days,” the excitement, the drama and the prizes; I devote an entire chapter in my book A Rising Son In The Land Of Nine Dragons.

During the Hyper YoYo boom in Japan in the 90’s, all kinds of awesome accessories were branded with the Hyper YoYo logo and released to capitalize on the craze; various holsters and cases, wallets, socks, sports wear, and even…jelly drinks. I’m not even totally sure what a jelly drink is, but I remember Jennifer Baybrook telling me she was straight-up addicted to them, and drank like a half-dozen a day while she was touring in Japan with THP.